Author: gwengrant

Growing older and having survived cancer at 40, a long time ago, certainly focuses the mind on the future and I was very aware of this when I wrote the poem FUTURE TENSE. I've always loved writing and still remember the excitement of the first longer piece of work I did. It was very experimental and I was certain it wouldn't get published. It probably wouldn't have but one of the small magazines, who did such great work for new writers, took that piece and many others. But that wasn't all they did. With infinite kindness, they often pointed out where I could improve my writing. My first book was a picture book, MATTHEW AND HIS MAGIC KITE, but after that, I started wanting to capture the humour and interest of where I lived, so PRIVATE-KEEP OUT came next followed by KNOCK AND WAIT and ONE WAY ONLY. They're not biographies because all I wanted to do was to catch the spirit of those times. It would be good if everyone wrote an account of their lives so their times are not lost. So many valuable histories unwritten and unread. When I was a girl, I loved the American writer, BETTY MACDONALD, with her very funny accounts of her family and her life in the 1940's. But NORMAN MAILER's, 'THE NAKED AND THE DEAD' spun me up to the stars when I stumbled across it in the subscription library I belonged to at fifteen. ERNEST HEMINGWAY's 'CHRISTMAS IN PARIS 1923', was so sublime and beautiful it was like a torch for writers and the Toronto Star Weekly must have published it with joy in their hearts. I wonder if there still is a Toronto Star Weekly?

HOMELAND

Street for Survivors by Hundretwasser

       HOMELAND

The good thing, of course,
Is that there’s plenty of space
In Love for everyone.
Plenty of places
To make ourselves at home
And plenty of time,
What with love being timeless
And all that,
To build a love strong enough
To defeat any trouble
And make a place for us.

                                 ©2020 Gwen Grant

LOVERS

 

LOVERS

Either he came along too late,
Or she was born too soon.
Whichever it was,
Those years they had lost
Were wild and wide and gone,
So they had a lot to catch up on.

On both sides,
There were exciting times to talk through.
For each of them,
Desperate days to walk through.
Still, there was plenty to talk about,
Plenty to discover about each other,
Lover to Lover.

So now, all was well and all was well,
For the living was just beginning.
The two of them, together,
Putting time in its place,
Slipping all those lost hours
Into their pockets,
To be remembered only when they felt
Strong enough to face them.

But not now, they decided, not now
And maybe not ever,
Not when the days were shining,
The nights blazing and burning
With no charred mornings to speak of.
Not when a plain old blade of grass
Spoke of heaven,
The heaven that lay in each other
Now time and love were with them,
New Lover loves New Lover.

Old lovers sent to the car wash.

                                          © 2018 Gwen Grant  

I LOVE GATES

I LOVE GATES

I love gates.
Gates are the very things
I am fond of.
Not the huge iron gates
Crackling with steel mesh
And threats,
To keep you in,
But the lovely little
Wooden gates,
Awash with tall grasses
And latches,
To let you out.
These gates, I love.

©2020 Gwen Grant

SPRING SONG

      SPRING SONG

Make this Spring song
A long song,
Make it wild and high
Like a new wind
Whistling old memories
Of elephants
Treading over mountains.

Make it a song
Of seas
Brimming with whales,
Starfish and monsters,
Of ghostly ships sailing
Decked with cobwebs
And old bones rattling.

Make it a song
Of people singing,
Of kind words,
Of gentle hands helping.

Make this Spring song
A long song
Of tenderness,
Of laughter,
With no surprises
Of goblins
Hiding in corners.

Make it a song
Of love.

                      ©2020 Gwen Grant